When was summer of love

But the lead singer of another group, the Great Society, was notably different. But she and her crowd were soon into smoking grass. Magnin when she walked into the Matrix club—of which Marty Balin was part owner—one night and heard Jefferson Airplane. Modeling was a pain in the ass.

She took the song to Jefferson Airplane when she replaced Signe Anderson. Needy Janis Joplin was the opposite of cool Grace Slick. She was always primed for rejection. A white girl from Texas, singing the blues? What gumption, what spirit! We swept the streets. Kelley and Mouse made their posters at Ashbury, across the street; Janis Joplin was down the block, often calling out to the others from her window.

Everything was spiritual. Everyone read The Tibetan Book of the Dead. They needed a name, and Caen supplied it. More and more young people were flooding the Haight, including four beautiful girls from Antioch College, in Ohio.

A sexy anarchist movement, the Diggers, had sprung up, and the girls joined in. But now, for us, it is! It was an extraordinary moment in history. The Vietnam War was raging, anti-war protests were surging, civil rights had morphed into Black Power, the Beatles and Bob Dylan were voicing a cultural revolution on FM airwaves. Second-tier Haights were soon popping up in every American city. This hubristic brio was rich soil for the Diggers.

They went together seamlessly. He was Emmett Grogan, a Brooklyn Catholic-school boy turned actor-anarchist. Remake society as you want it to be, now! Assume freedom! A burgeoning group, the Diggers were passionately leaderless. There were no followers.

The Diggers wore animal masks and held up traffic in down-with-money demonstrations. They drove a flatbed truck of belly dancers and conga drummers into the financial district and passed out joints to the crowd. They dispensed fake dollar bills printed with winged penises. They cadged day-old food from markets and fresh food from farmers and turned them into Digger Stew.

The music was as free as the food. Collecting everything from machinery to clothes, the Diggers opened the Free Store. Goldhaft and the late Peter Berg subsequently founded the ecological organization Planet Drum.

Coyote and Grogan once hitchhiked to L. Grogan died of a suspected overdose on a New York subway in The Diggers created the poverty-is-sexy ideology for young panhandlers. Beat Generation speakers and poets gathered in Golden Gate Park to celebrate key ideas of the s rebellion: communal living, political decentralisation, environmental awareness and 'dropping out'.

Jefferson Airplane played and LSD was distributed amongst the crowds when a power failure led to a break in the music. The Haight-Ashbury district, where dissaffected student groups gathered, became the focal point of hippy counterculture, and , young people arrived there over the summer.

The local council supposedly came up with the title 'Summer of Love' to put a positive spin on the druggy, hairy, hippy gatherings that were portrayed negatively by the media. By the autumn, everything had soured and a dark side distorted the hippies' hopeful aspirations.

Almost no other pop culture phenomenon has been as filled with as many contradictions as the Summer of Love, which took place in but was felt across the continent and as far away as England. They were eager to join in a mass communal gathering-cum-celebration — if not try to build a brave new world for a week, a month, a year, or maybe even a lifetime.

For others, it set into motion a tsunami of change whose ripple effects are still palpable today. Not so for Tijuana-bred rock guitar legend Carlos Santana , who moved to San Francisco in and has never stopped embracing the Summer of Love. Now as then, proponents regard the Summer of Love as a profoundly important tipping point, while detractors dismiss it as a cesspool of drugs, hedonism and near-anarchy.

Either way, it helped transform the then-budding hippie and counterculture movements into a way of life that was liberating for many of those who embraced it, divisive to those who did not. That was responsible for the ideology of the Summer of Love spreading around the world. We were trying to lead a better life and do better by each other.

While welcomed as a visiting hero, he was not impressed by what he encountered. That was when I changed, cut my hair and left the hippie world. That was when I left an old movement and got into a new movement. At that time, your hair length and clothes said who you were. It was a time when people were hoping for love because we had the madness, immorality and illegality of the war in Vietnam.

We had civil unrest in our country, racism and negative messages of greed and selfishness. Both were teenagers at the time. Both grew their hair long.

Both were intrigued by the shape-shifting forces that were sweeping up many in their generation. And, without using any mind-altering substances, it was mind-blowing! As a teenage boy, I was fascinated by the Summer of Love and free love. But that was from afar, from hearing and reading about it.

In the moment, I realized musical walls were tumbling down. Like Vaus, Bartell stresses he was never a hippie, although he did part his hair in the middle during his late teens and early twenties. While attending summer school in San Francisco in , he happily visited Haight-Ashbury a number of times. But that optimism was the feeling at the time. Jerry Rubin , Timothy Leary , Allen Ginsberg , and Jefferson Airplane all participated in the event, a celebration of hippie culture and values.

John Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas took twenty minutes to write the following lyrics for the song San Francisco :. The song was designed originally to promote the upcoming Monterey Pop Festival , in June. Scott McKenzie 's cover of the song was released in May [1]. Later that summer, thousands of young people from around the nation flocked to the Haight-Ashbury district of the city to join in a popularized version of the hippie experience.

The phrase "Summer of Love" or, more accurately, the " Second Summer of Love " is sometimes used particularly in the UK to refer to the summer of and the rise of Acid House music and rave culture.